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Sunday, 12 August 2012

Pop music's decline

Looking back at the decades since my youth I have noticed a
steady decline in the overall quality of pop music. I had attributed this to an
inability to keep up with changing tastes, thinking that since the 1960s the
music has gone steadily down hill as I have veered towards classical music,
soul, gospel, blues, heavy metal and folk rather than chart offerings. Today’s
pop music, when I hear it, seems less adventurous: it lacks real inspired
melody and lyrics. It must just be me and my generation, I thought. People of
all generations always think that the old days were best, possibly because of
the memories they evoke.

However, a recent artificial intelligence study of timbre, pitch and loudness reported in a Scientific American blogseems to back up the
intuition of many of my generation who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost
half a million pop songs released over 1955-2010 were analysed for sound
colour, texture, tonal quality, chords, melody, tonal arrangement and loudness.
They show a clear peak in the early 1960s,
after which the music gradually got blander, less diverse and less adventurous
while its loudness and violence increased, possibly as a compensation for the
dullness of inspirational content. (We are talking about averages. There were
obviously exceptions.)

The lyrics were also examined and it seems these got darker,
more negative and more self-absorbed. This may well be the clue. Pop
music came to life rather like the Cambrian explosion of marine life half a
billion years ago – suddenly. It came from the gospel, soul and blues music of
black African slaves liberated by the Holy Spirit. It reached a peak very
quickly and on the whole the lyrics were wholesome and positive even in
adversity, the tunes were powerful and memorable. For me the apex of this era
was exemplified by the Ben E King song Stand by me, released in 1961.

Somehow I can't imagine a song of such innocence, depth, power and simplicity coming out of the music world today. It did not make so much of an impression at the time as it did recently, three years after becoming confirmed as a follower of Christ. I now see it as portraying the steadfast and robust nature of true faith and feel it must have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. Since coming to believe this I

Can't
remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died

He was referring to
the death of Buddy Holly, another giant of the era, who died in a plane crash
in 1959. Albeit with ups and downs it was predominantly down from then on.

Ideas of right and wrong, non-sexual love and devotion to
truth gave way to moral relativism, post-modernism, obsession with sex and iconoclasms.
The monstrosity of the Vietnam War was in my view, on balance, a betrayal of
Christian values, because although it might have helped prevent attacks on the
relatively free societies of the west - and even this is debatable - it was at least partly, if not
mainly, motivated by the wealthy classes’ fear of losing their wealth should
communism ever make it to the USA. Apart from the appalling dehumanisation and loss of life it had another consequence. Befuddled
thinking emerging from the anti war protesters led to the rejection of
Christianity itself, the denial of the divine source of being by many, and a
revolt against not only the bad in western society but the good. This was
despite the Christ-inspired Martin Luther King as he led America towards the
Civil Rights Act of 1968.

New mantras and beliefs began to ring through society: if it
feels good, do it; whatever turns you on; what’s true for one person may not be
true for another; all leaders are bad; all attempts to improve society are
corrupt conspiracies – a belief which if stated sufficiently often will be
self-fulfilling.

In the UK, at least,
a new version of the 'upper class twit' appeared in the media – so-called intellectuals
who preached liberalism and free love; they diluted and denigrated the sacred,
they ridiculed the values and weakened the Enlightenment foundations on which western society
was built. They misled young people into a downhill spiral of promiscuity,
consumerism and debt, the consequences of which are only now beginning to be apparent.

A lot of what was thrown out deserved to be thrown out. Love
was elevated above religion by The Beatles (All you need is love) and
Jefferson Airplane (You need somebody to love) precisely as Christ taught.
Yet mad theories about Him being a space traveller or social worker undermined
belief in the Divine Truth of the Holy Trinity, the triune nature of the Creator and
reality itself. Many of you reading this now will scoff at the very expression
of Divine Truth.

So in retrospect it is not surprising that pop music, too,
has gone into decline. The focus on money as the object of life discourages
originality. There are still excellent bands and musicians about (my own
brother is a US rock musician); but increasingly even young adults have to rely
on re-issues and collector’s items to get good music as an alternative to angry
self-pitying rap or soulless heavy metal (not all of it, some is brilliant) or
bland disco fodder or pretentiousness or those who resort to shock or
tastelessness. For live music there is an increasing reliance on tribute
artists and old or reformed groups. As for the selling of recorded music this
increasingly relies on repackaging commercially safe music from the past.

This is no doubt an oversimplification. Some social and
environmental reforms have been made since 1955 and there are some excellent
rock, folk and blues musicians about. Occasionally an inspired mainstream pop
song hits the charts. Also, new ways of marketing music without destroying its
integrity are being explored, making use of the web.

Is this situation likely to change? Yes, I think so. But
first people have to recognise and relate to the divine, because it is only
transcendentally that great music of any kind is generated within us. It comes from the same source that peace on earth must ultimately come.